Linked List: June 30, 2010

Wednesday, 30 June 2010

Fancypants iOS 4 Folder Names 

Clever tip from Jeff Richardson: use Neven Mrgan’s Glyphboard to make fancy iOS folder names.

David Pogue Reviews the Motorola Droid X 

Worth it just for his coinage of “app phones” as a name for the iPhone and Android class of devices. Update: Ends up Pogue has been using “app phones” since his review of the original Droid back in November.

Amazon Buys Woot 

Woot CEO Matt Rutledge:

Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot — with a wall of ideas and a dartboard.

Mobile Browser Cache Limits for Android, iOS, and WebOS 

Interesting research from Ryan Grove at Yahoo. I was not aware that MobileSafari didn’t support Last-Modified and ETag headers until iOS 4.

Microsoft Kills Kin 

Serious question: Everyone knew these Kin phones were turds from the moment they leaked. They were unappealing on their own and were a distraction from Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s “real” effort to get back in the game. Microsoft is full of smart people; I’ll bet most people at Microsoft knew these things were doomed, too. So how did these things ever see the light of day?

My answer: Steve Ballmer has no taste, so there’s no plan, so middle managers just run amok and waste hundreds of millions of dollars and years of time on projects like Kin.

Regarding the Verizon/iPhone Hardware Issue 

John Biggs:

Tell me “I told you so” in six months, but Bloomberg’s exciting news that two dudes said something about the iPhone coming to Verizon is false until we see hardware and there has been no hardware. Apple picked GSM because it is an international standard. CDMA, the system used by Verizon and Sprint, is about as international as American beer – both are considered weak and both are reviled.

It’s true that a Verizon iPhone would require new hardware. But that’s not a holdup. I’m nearly certain that a Verizon-compatible iPhone is pretty much like the Intel-compatible version of Mac OS X — something that Apple has kept going all along, ready to put into production when, if ever, its time comes.

It’s all strategy and negotiations. I wouldn’t have been shocked if they’d gone to Verizon a year ago, and wouldn’t be shocked if it doesn’t happen for another two or three years. But whenever the time comes, hardware won’t hold it up.

Microscopic Photos of the iPhone 4’s Gyroscope 

I love these iFixit guys.

The Results of Technologizer’s iPad Owner Survey 

They like it. (One tidbit that jumped out to me: the built-in Notes app garnered unusually low scores.)

Vuvuzelas for BP 

Count me in.

Jonathan Ive on the Design of the iPhone 4 

Huge score for Core77 — an interview with Jonathan Ive regarding the design of the iPhone 4.

“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material — the material informs the form,” says Ive. “It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”

‘How a Broker Spent $520 Million in a Drunken Stupor and Moved the Global Oil Price’ 

Rowena Mason, reporting for The Telegraph:

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

Now that’s a bender. (Via Chris Espinosa.)

Lightning Strikes Three Buildings in Chicago at Once 

Gorgeous video by Craig Shimala. (Via Jack Shedd.)